"[...] tonight Apple entered into evidence in its trial with Samsung a document showing that it offered the South Korean company a licensing deal on some of its key technologies. Specifically, Apple offered to license the portfolio of patents if Samsung would pay $30 per smartphone and $40 per tablet." $30-40 per device is a lot of money for some trivial features (rounded corners, slide-to-unlock etc). No wonder Samsung declined.

Yes, they did. But they made a lot of prototypes and apparently this one done as a fun side project, but it doesn't really matter as they didn't use this design for their released products.

Furthermore the Sony product that apparently was used as inspiration was itself modeled after an Apple product.

But again it doesn't matter what you design behind closed doors, what matters is what your market and what people pay money for.

Samsung came with something crappy and improved it by trying to make their product look as much like an Apple product as they thought they could get away with. Now it was still crappy, but at least more people bought it.